Terminus Read online

  Then she saw the third shape much farther away, by the convent’s corner. A black horse. Two more, both brown, stood almost motionless by the trees behind. One had a rider.

  Her breath stuck in her throat. For a moment she was pinned to the earth, squeezed still by the weight of what she’d seen. Bandino dead. The monastery and convent’s chimneys stilled. Riders.

  Neither Saint Augusta’s nor Saint Niccoluccio’s had much worth stealing. It was only the beginning of spring harvest. They had no food stockpiled. The only thing the orphanages had were their children. Even eastern barbarians wouldn’t charge into a place without scouting first. They had to have known what they would find.

  They were after her and her friends. Hostages. Slaves.

  She spotted more horses, but not many. In total, there were no more than half a dozen riders about the convent. She looked about, abruptly conscious of how much of the land was hidden by the fields’ slopes. She wasn’t the only one who could be hiding. The wheel-rut road to Treviso was lost behind one of the hills that made plowing so frustrating.

  The wind whispered along the wheat. It was nearly, but not quite, enough to cover the noise coming from the road. A shuffling. Hooves kicking along the dirt. Then, briefly, a choke, a cry cut off.

  Fia made another decision before she realized it. Carefully, staying low, she headed in that direction.

  She found the girls. There were not as many as there should have been. There were about fifteen, out of Saint Augusta’s thirty-five. They marched amid four riders. The boys followed, and there were more of them – twenty or so. Fia stifled her breath. From this distance, she could not see their faces.

  The kids walked in a coffle, hands unbound but a rope tight around their necks. One rider held onto the front end, and a second the rear. Together, they could draw it taut at will, choking their captives.

  She hoped the missing kids had gotten away, but of course she had no means to tell. A handful of the fathers were lashed into the end of the line. There was no sign of the mothers. Fia’s throat tightened. The mothers must have gotten enough warning to flee. They had not made any attempt to defend their charges or some of them would be here right now.

  None of the boys or girls walked with limps or cradled arms, though she did catch shadows that might have been bruises. Something odd – they all looked uniformly down. They had been coached to do so. The rope had been drawn tight to keep them from looking around, making noise.

  The soldiers needed them silent, Fia realized, because their attack hadn’t concluded. The riders standing still by Saint Augusta’s weren’t loafing. They were keeping watch.

  This handful of soldiers weren’t enough to have done all this by themselves. There still had to be others out there.

  The whisper of the wind changed again. The wheat hissed. Footsteps. Breath.

  Close.

  She held still, a prayer frozen on her breath.

  A hard shock between her shoulder blades propelled her out of her crouch. She fought for her balance, taking two stumbling steps forward, and then crashed belly first onto the dirt road.

  She had landed out in full view. The riders halted. More chokes and gasps as the riders tugged the ropes.

  Fia rolled, craned herself to a seat. A soldier stood where she had been, grinning and silent. His hair was unwashed, his beard wild. He had a horseman’s bowed legs. Some combination of age and sun had turned his skin prematurely old, like pumice.

  The soldier’s leather armor made him look broad-shouldered, but in truth he was shorter than her. No wonder he’d been assigned to scouting. A taller soldier couldn’t have sneaked up on her.

  She tried to hide her rage. After giving her a moment to appreciate her situation, he stepped toward her.

  As soon as he was close enough, she lashed her leg out, kicked hard into his knee. He yelled. She hooked her leg around his ankle and pulled back.

  He crashed to the ground much harder than she had.

  Her head was still spinning. It took her longer than she liked to climb atop him, and that gave him time to recover. He deflected her first punch. Her second struck true, square in his nose. He didn’t so much as grunt. By then, his other arm had found leverage underneath her.

  He may have been short, but he had muscles. He twisted, shoved.

  She landed hard. Needle-sharp stalks of short-cut wheat pierced her cheek and neck. She rolled, too dizzy to think. She lost track of which way was up. By the time she got to her feet, her cheek and her wrist bloody, she was facing the wrong way.

  The soldier could have gotten her good. But his shout of fury gave him away long before the snap of the wheat did. Like Saint Niccoluccio’s boys did when they fought, he gave too much away.

  She ducked, feinted left and stepped to her right. She felt the breeze of his passage. She swung around, and slammed her elbow into the small of his back.

  Too late, she saw his eight-inch blade, swinging around.

  A searing hot line sliced across her ribs, down her abdomen. She spun away. The fire blazed across her chest, spread across the rest of her body. Her breath became ash, caking in her throat.

  She had seen animals slaughtered before. The boys hunted, and brought their game to the girls to butcher. She knew what it would look like. She grabbed her side, expecting to be holding loose folds of skin and fat.

  Nothing. Her tunic was unblemished but for the dirt.

  A phantom white-hot pain ran across her side, over her belly. But there was no cut. He must have struck her, by happenstance, with the blunt side of his blade. She was lucky to live. She could hardly believe that she did.

  She rose at the same time as him. They were both winded, staggering. His face was slick with blood. It oozed from his nose, down into his neck. He panted with fury.

  Pain jabbed through Fia’s jaw. She’d landed harder than she’d realized. An iron-strong splinter of a dead wheat stalk stuck in her cheek.

  She felt along the side of her abdomen again, just in case. Still no wound. The phantom pain was fading. But, in that moment, she had been sure she was dying.

  The moment changed her.

  The soldier looked along the side of his dagger as if he, too, was surprised. He had meant to kill her.

  None of the riders had moved. They held their captives still. Fia’s opponent wavered. She had made enough of an impression on him that he hesitated to start another round.

  She eyed the blade, tried to think of another way through this. She could have run. If she’d found enough of her breath, she could slip off the edge of their land. Find the girls who’d gotten away. Or the nuns who’d abandoned them.

  If she’d wanted to run away from Saint Augusta’s, she could have, a long time ago. When she’d slipped away from her escorts this morning, she could have gone in any direction. She’d come here.

  She was not the kind to run.

  She raised her hands, held them palms flat. Then she turned and marched towards the riders. She didn’t dare look back at the soldier.

  When the riders tied her into the coffle, they didn’t wrap her rope as tightly as around the others. They kept their distance. She glared at them. She persisted in holding her hands up until they were done.

  She had been tied into the end of the line, just behind some of the fathers. The boys and girls from Saint Augusta’s and Saint Niccoluccio’s didn’t look back. They couldn’t.

  It had all happened without one spoken word. Fia’s breath still burned. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d had anything to say.

  After a minute of silence to make sure the noise of the scuffle hadn’t flushed out any other hidden hostages, the riders tugged the rope. Time to move.

  Fia started. From somewhere, she thought she heard Pandolfo’s voice.

  You’re a peculiar girl, Fiametta of Treviso.

  She looked about, but her thoughts were too disordered to find its source.

  A pull from behind meant that her rider had seen her looking. The other captives grun
ted. The rope was even tighter around their necks. She kept her gaze ahead.

  A tender slice of pain traced from her ribs to her stomach. A phantom pain to go with the phantom voice. Real, but only to her. A livid, uncontrollable sensation.

  If you pay attention, if you’re good…

  Her cheek continued to bleed. She could not brush away the blood from her cheek while she marched, not without punishment from the rider behind her. Couldn’t look around to make sure no one was near enough to talk.

  You might become worth a fraction as much as you think you are.

  She did not grant the voice the dignity of answering. It did not matter. It knew that she was curious anyway.

  As the coffle wound along the track and the pressure on her neck eased, Fia finally smelled smoke. She turned her head just long enough to catch the fire teasing the horizon. The rider behind her yanked the rope. The last she saw of Saint Augusta’s was the roof, aflame.

  3

  The line to the water cart advanced in single steps.

  Fia was annoyed by how quickly she had gotten accustomed to her new life’s routines. It had only taken months. She shuffled ahead, keeping her head covered and eyes down.

  Two years into her journey with Captain Antonov’s Company, the indignities only bothered her when she made an effort to think of them.

  Another routine fact of life: it was important to only draw attention to herself at those moments when she was sure she could control it, harness it, and otherwise put it to use.

  It was a hot and dry campaigning season. Captain Antonov’s soldiers remained on the move even in the peak of summer, when the other armies of South Italy quartered. His men marched to the front of the water line as soon as they entered it. They pushed each other aside, and had less mercy for the camp followers.

  But they only pushed Fia. She had blacked some eyes the first time one of them had knocked her away. She’d gotten worse in return, but no formal discipline. The soldiers had been too embarrassed to be beaten by her to bring her up on it.

  Now they all knew who she was. From the moment she’d started her career by fighting the man who’d captured her, she’d built her reputation. More than reputation, she had the ear of Captain Antonov.

  The line took two steps backward as another pair of soldiers barged ahead.

  The sun seared the dirt underfoot. It was a war sun, made for burning. Something foul must have been coming. No matter the specifics of the weather that found them before battle, the misery seemed a constant.

  The last time it had been this hot, she had nursed a man with blood dried black on his lips. He’d begged for water, but she’d had none to give.

  She looked back over the line. Her instincts were right. The soldiers were quiet as they drank, their shoulders tense.

  The water line was a daily opportunity to take stock of faces she recognized. Not many of the old ones remained. Most people in line were strangers. Men and women with lined faces, numbed by weariness. Not many of the boys and girls from the orphanage were left. Maybe five, counting herself.

  These mercenaries had hoped to extract a ransom. While raiding, they seized small laborers. Their lords, always in dire need of work after a harvest had been burned, usually paid. If that failed, Captain Antonov and his company aimed to rely on the bleeding hearts of the towns and churches. Threatened to drown their prisoners unless someone paid.

  Captain Antonov was a stranger to this land. He and his condottieri had heard that Saint Augusta’s relied on plague orphans as farmhands. They had underestimated how few people cared about them. The church had paid for the monks, but not the orphans.

  Captain Antonov had not actually wanted to drown the orphans. He and his corporals were mean men, ruthless men, but there was nothing worthwhile in killing children. There were plenty of condottieri who would have, to prove the mettle of their threats. These men didn’t have so much pride.

  So the company had chosen a second option: slavery.

  She had gone to work for Captain Antonov himself. Fia had toiled hard for her freedom. She traveled with the camp followers, mending clothes and armor, caring for mules and horses, nursing wounded. Her freedom price had been set low. It was as if Antonov had not wanted to keep her any longer than necessary to extract a minimum face-saving profit.

  She still remembered the look on Antonov’s face when she had piled the last of her silver coins into her palms and announced that she wanted to stay. He had been impressed.

  Free or not, she still had companions here. And something else, too.

  A good part of her felt more at home now than she ever had at Saint Augusta’s. It had taken a long time to understand that. She was a camp servant. A laundress and a seamstress. But she was also a fighter. When the soldiers were on the move, everyone left in camp was expected to guard not only their own belongings, but help defend the treasure train. All of them, even the prostitutes, had weapons.

  It was a very eastern way of organizing an army. Nothing Pandolfo described had prepared her for it. The camp followers trailing Italian and English armies stayed clear of any fighting.

  At length, Fia reached the cart and procured half a bucket to water her mule. As she passed back through the line, she counted accents. Captain Antonov had started his career with a corps of Russians, but had lost men and accumulated more along the way, like a cyclone picking up and tossing debris. Now he had a host of other easterners: Albanians, Grecians, Hungarians, Germans, plus no small number of Italians. Italian condottieri did not shrink from working for foreigners.

  These men were as she’d imagined from Pandolfo’s stories, but more. There was a steadfastness in them that she had not seen in other men. Not the fathers of Saint Niccoluccio. Not Pandolfo. Not her father.

  She hadn’t known it at the time, but Captain Antonov had been at Saint Augusta’s on the day of her capture, watching. She’d been put to work laundering his clothes and stitching his leathers. She’d seemed to amuse him – until, that was, he’d seen her fight a second time.

  The amusement had faded. He’d started to see her as who she was.

  The officers staged fights between the men, placed bets. They cleared an arena at the edge of every camp. Soldiers and servants alike encircled it, struck or shoved any fighter who was pushed out or who tried to escape. Few women fought, but Fia wasn’t the only one. She had the best record of any of them. She’d only been battered unconscious once. She was starting to build a reputation for never showing pain.

  She set her water by her animal. When she’d joined the camp, she’d strained to carry the buckets. Now she hardly felt it.

  Tonight, the company camped by a grove of trees shooting from the grassland like water from a spring. She laid her belongings where she could keep an eye on them, and went to the trees. They were her gymnasium. She jumped, hauled herself onto branches. She climbed and dropped, climbed and dropped. She snapped a branch and swung it into the trunk, over and over, like she would club an opponent.

  Her nose had quietly broken in her last match. It stung whenever she breathed hard. It never hurt worse than now. The first several dozen times she had exercised like this, she had exhausted herself. She had fallen asleep right after. Now all she felt was angry. The anger accumulated after each swing, each jump, and would not go away. She could not settle afterward, except into work.

  Some of the soldiers watched from a distance. Good, she thought. Let them. Maybe more of them would bet on her.

  The soldiers sheltered their camp inside ditches and barricades. Every night it was the same, carefully laid out in patterns that the easterners had learned from the Italians. But the servants’ camp was outside the barricades, and more lackadaisical. Tents and shelters squatted in clusters. Groups of friends stuck together. Here were the smiths, with the few tools they could haul on campaign. There were the drivers, there the cooks…

  Antonov’s Company numbered somewhere above a thousand men. About half as many servants trailed after them. Any army n
eeded civilians, free skilled and unskilled laborers and slaves, to sustain it. Antonov’s Company had no home, and so brought all of theirs with them. Drivers, petty apprentices, smiths, tailors, launderers, herders to shepherd the company’s legion of stolen sheep and cattle. By far the most common laborers in the camp were the prostitutes. They lived in a city, and all together.

  The first few months she and the girls of Saint Augusta’s had lived here, they’d huddled together. Not all of the other girls had been fond of her, bully that she’d been, but she became their protector. Gradually, as each of them had found their places, they’d spread out, lost sight of each other. Fia made herself useful elsewhere. She sewed, she repaired leather armor. She’d learned to recognize sick cattle. She’d even guarded hostages. She’d held her knife to the chin of a captive farmhand who thought he could knock her down and run.

  A handful of the others from Saint Augusta’s and Saint Niccoluccio’s had bought themselves free, too. They hadn’t stayed. Others had slipped into the wilderness.

  They weren’t kids any more. Fia had shepherded them through their worst times, but let them go without saying goodbye.

  As she settled back into her shelter, one of the crossbowmen, a North African who spoke with a southern Italian accent, tried to negotiate her down from her three-grosso fee for repairing torn leather. His voice had a desperate edge. So many of the rank and file were in debt to lenders within and without the company.

  “Three grosso,” she insisted.

  “Two.” He tried to make it sound like an order. Like he was her superior.

  “Four,” she said.

  He shifted, caught off guard. She held him in her gaze. He was too fresh a recruit to know her business reputation.

  After an invitation to consider his alternatives, he paid four.

  She spent most of the night jabbing needles through stiffened leather, cursing God’s blood under her breath. She was good at what she did. She always had been. But that didn’t make the work any easier. The leather had been boiled to resist puncture. Her catgut thread cut into her fingers, ripped her nails.